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Being in the know with Brandwatch

Time is an all too elusive and sought after commodity. Working at an agency I never seem to have enough of it. I always have a list of exciting things I’d like to do that have to come second to getting the important stuff done on time – ‘one day’ is a phrase I know all too well!

I work with various monitoring, planning, reporting and insight software and tools every day, and I’m always aware that I could be doing more to learn shortcuts and easy methods to pull out the data that both Bloom and my clients want to see – but it’s all down to time. For example, up until last week, I knew that I was getting some rather than all of the insight that I could get out of social media monitoring tool Brandwatch.

Brandwatch identified that this was an issue for many of their clients and decided to do something about it. They invited a host of us (aka #Brandwatchers) to give up a precious weekday afternoon to spend some time with them to tackle all of the above.

When I received the invitation I was really impressed with the welcoming tone and the fact that the core team at Brandwatch wanted to be proactive and show their clients that they are valued partners rather than just ‘users’.

From the get go, it was a welcoming affair. I made a friend on the way in, (hi Beth!) was greeted warmly by my account manager Katie within minutes of arrival and Andy had listened to and resolved a query regarding user access and daily alerts within half an hour. This alone saves me half an hour a day, half an hour I can spend doing more creative and useful work for Bloom’s clients.

I went to London expecting a couple of presentations and a coffee. What I got however, was far more interesting.

Firstly it was great to see Giles, CEO of Brandwatch, kick off the proceedings with a presentation on the brand values and company culture. Brandwatch are open, friendly and innovation focused – values that were clearly evident in the attitude of the staff I met on Thursday and their enthusiasm for the job.

I liked hearing about the people behind the company, and how they work creatively to develop and update the tool – Brandwatch unveil a new rollout every two weeks!

It was also interesting to learn about how the team had correctly predicted 15 out of 18 Oscar winners, (The Social Oscars), and it was really encouraging to find out from Paul Shepherd, (Coup Media) a client of Brandwatch, that he has created a Twitter sentiment tool – Tweview – which is powered by Brandwatch to tell you ‘what people think about that thing you’re thinking about’. The tool first focused on films – using the (70% accurate) Brandwatch sentiment analysis, it looked at how the sentiment of conversation surrounding a film on Twitter impacted on cinema attendance and the success of the film at the box office.

The highlight of the event for me, though, was listening to what Glenn, Brandwatch’s Product Manager, had to share with us. He explained the process he goes through for a feature request, which involves input from clients as well as the development team internally. There is then a six to eight week planning period before the new feature is rolled out in beta. Beta rollouts happen every two weeks throughout the year, which is really brilliant for #Brandwatchers, enjoying the benefits of monitoring 64 million different sources!

Coming soon..

This was the really exciting part of the afternoon for geeks like me!

Here’s what we got to find out first-hand:

Channels: soon we’ll be able to monitor specific Facebook and Twitter business pages, comparing and contrasting against competitors’ pages too.

Channels will include ‘mentions that matter’, which will highlight metrics such as re-tweets at your handle, clicks, impact and engagement score. All of this data will be available to pull into the usual Brandwatch charts too. I can’t wait for the beta of this one! Glenn stated that YouTube and Pinterest will hopefully be coming soon as well, and that the aim of this is ‘owned versus earned – how does the stuff I’m doing compare with the stuff that’s out there?’ a question that is truly worth answering with a good report.

A new UX: the new user interface will

reduce complexity

provide insights in seconds

open the dashboard immediately on log-in: a window onto data

pdf exports

home sweet home: tools, categories, alerts will have their own section

The future of insights: Dashboard as news feed with

signals

milestones

points of interest

a ‘weatherwatch’ of live data

All in all it was an afternoon well-spent, and I found everybody approachable and helpful. It was an afternoon full of interesting information about what’s now and what’s next from the best social media monitoring tool there is around (well, that’s what I think anyway!).